In 2001, when the Wadsworth Atheneum discovered it was the benefactor of Edward Gorey’s trove of fine art, curators must have rubbed their hands wickedly in collective glee.

Gorey, the master of the mirthful macabre, was not merely one of the most celebrated 20th-century illustrators, he was one of the most popular. He would be – pun intended – a terrific draw. If nobody knew Gorey from his delightfully devilish “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” or “The Doubtful Guest,” they would surely know him from the amusingly ominous opening title sequence on the BBC’s “Mystery.”

OK, it was weird that Gorey, long identified with Manhattan and Cape Cod, would leave his work to a museum in Hartford.

Then again, weird was the language in which Gorey was most fluent.

“Gorey’s Worlds,” now on view at the Wadsworth, offers a selection from that bequest, paired with actual Gorey artwork from the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust in Yarmouth, Mass. The coupling reunites Gorey’s distinctive, spidery drawings of flighty Fidknops, glowering Gawdges and wily Wiggly Umps, with artwork he accumulated. So, if you’ve wondered where Gorey got his subversive sense of gloom, here are some magnificent clues.

Here are Edouard Manet, Charles Meryon, Eugène Atget, Odilon Redon and Charles Burchfield – a specialty team of precisionists who share an openness to the mystical. Pairing Gorey’s art with what he admired underscores two pillars of Gorey’s genius: He was an impeccable draftsman and willfully peculiar.

“My mission in life,” he once said, “is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.”

To enter the murky and perilous world of Gorey was to fall into a netherworld of anachronistic nightmares where gentlefolk were not always gentle, wild beasts were not necessarily savage and time did not so much stand still as encompass past, present, and future.

“It was the day after Tuesday and the day before Wednesday,” begins “The Epileptic Bicycle.”

And through it all there is Gorey’s breathtaking artistry. These are all simply pen-and-ink drawings created by a series of hash marks. But look at the texture, the tones, the tendrils of detail. A man in a fur coat stands in balletic position, his back toward us.

It’s a simple subject, but Gorey creates intricate textures through the varying lengths and widths of meticulously applied lines. It’s often the space between the lines – the empty white rectangles that separate two sturdy trees – that lend the images emotive ballast.

If Gorey (1925-2000) could seem unsettlingly ghoulish, the art he collected reveals a man deeply steeped in literary and artistic conventions, which he squeezed and twisted through the vise of English nonsense verse and through the funhouse of French absurdism. His clearest antecedents are Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, but he was deeply affected by the surrealists and the French théâtre de l’absurde.

THE EXHIBIT OPENS, suitably enough, with a flying fur coat.

Fur coats – this one is a lynx – were a Gorey signature, along with the kohl-eyed maidens, fantastical creatures, fabulous fops, wasp-waisted women and a menagerie of hybridized, anthropomorphic beasts. Gorey, a towering 6-feet-4-inches, wore the coats into the 1980s, when he had a dramatic change of conscience. They appear repeatedly in Gorey works of stuffy Edwardian gentlemen, typically deadened to the mordant absurdities around them.

The exhibit, insightfully curated by Erin Monroe, reminds viewers that everything began, for Gorey, with words. A precocious child who had read “Dracula” and “Alice in Wonderland” – in many ways the pillars of his work – by the time he was 3, Gorey dabbled in phrases before he doodled.

The exhibit contains a note labeled “For Albert York” on which Gorey lists 15 ideas, among them, “two men dancing a tango in tails.” Nearby is Gorey’s fluid articulation of that notion – two faceless dancers, tails and limbs flying in an empty field.

It’s comic – in an anomalous way, but it’s also unnerving: Why don’t the men have faces? What is that enormous Gatsby-esque car doing in the background?

Gorey, who invited more questions than he answered, did so with such playful, campy elegance, that it seemed rude not to guffaw.

Born to a comfortable Midwestern family, Gorey was an only child, educated at boarding schools and Harvard, where he studied French literature. It’s French literature – with its fondness for puns and inclination toward the absurd – that seems to have had the most lasting affect on Gorey. You can see it in his fondness for the photographs of Atget, whose landscapes loom with a sense of ominousness and nostalgia. Atget’s sparseness, in works like “Ombelles” and “Parc de Rambouillet” seem like backdrops for portentous Gorey illustrations.

Like Atget, Gorey seems to position his work in a proscenium, as in his tragic tale of a love-struck opera buff, “The Blue Aspic,” which ends with the protagonist in an asylum.

All sorts of tragic and fantastical events happen in Gorey’s works, and while the drawings are spectacular and strange, so are the limericks:

At the Villa Nemetia the sleepers

Are disturbed by a phantom in weepers;

It beats all night long

A dirge on a gong

As it staggers about in the creepers.”

Is that ridiculous? Terrifying? Or both?

Probably both. While Gorey’s world was ghoulish, it was never gory. On the contrary, it seemed so self-consciously artificial – children with oversized heads and smallish feet, featureless faces and contorted limbs – that it lacked the spleen of satire. As Stephen Schiff wrote in The New Yorker, “His victims are too vacuous to inspire pity and terror, and his tone is too cool to make you wring your hands. The only recourse is to laugh, and you do.”

Gorey, who came to Manhattan in the early 1950s, began publishing his own books under a company he christened “Fantod,” a 19th-century word meaning “a state of irritability, anxiety, or fidgets.” In 1959, he attracted the attention of critic Edmund Wilson, who called his work “surrealistic and macabre, amusing and somber, nostalgic and claustrophobic, poetic and poisoned.”

It is all of that, and a little more. The Wadsworth exhibit is a welcome invitation to revisit that starchy Edwardian world Gorey created and find in it an absurdist tension perfect for our current cultural moment.